If so- Please stop being afraid and embrace your dreams of being a performer! Students that graduate with Performance degrees can make a good living performing in chamber ensembles, orchestras, freelancing and teaching privately and through an institution such as conservatories, community colleges, universities, community music schools and public schools.
 it seems that nowadays you can even get a public school music director job as a performance major. And if you don’t want to teach public school then what most performance major graduates do is first get their Masters or even DMA and then teach privately, some even get their Suzuki training license so they can establish their own Suzuki program and run it out of their own home or home studio. Or, even without the license you can also mix and match your “traditional” studio teaching program with some Suzuki techniques and rep.
And, of course performance majors often wind up performing in orchestras and/or chamber groups- either in permanent positions or as freelancers or both. And being entrepreneurial doesn’t hurt either- for example, many performance major graduates start their own chamber groups or form chamber orchestras, or start their own small music schools where they have control of the programs that they offer.
It’s important to keep in mind that if you are feeling pressured to go for a Music Ed degree or other non performance music degrees (“so you can be guaranteed a job”) you will NOT have much time to practice if you are enrolled in a music academic curriculum in your music school or university/college. Performance majors have much more time to dedicate to practicing to help ensure that they can achieve their highest level on their instrument or voice and gain the most knowledge of their art and how it affects the world around us. This includes having more time to research and uncover works by composers that have been overlooked in our repertoire as well as learning how and where to engage more meaningfully within our communities by performing, reaching out and sharing our music through performance.
